Tom Stoppard Quotes

My mind gets into a verbal mode.

I like plays where people talk a lot. Conversation is sustained. Argument is sustained.

The truth is, we value your company, for want of any other. We have been left so much to our own devices—after a while one welcomes the uncertainty of being left to other people's.

Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover.

What are a friend's books for if not to be borrowed?

Death followed by eternity the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.

Death is the ultimate negative.

Childhood is Last Chance Gulch for happiness. After that, you know too much.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

I don't act, I don't direct, I don't design.

I can't remember what my first script was.

People think there's a choice between smoking and immortality, but we've all got to die of something.

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

I'm attracted to the past.

If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.

I burn with no causes.

I've got no interest in educating or instructing people.

I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

Theater is a recreation. It can be much more, but unless it's recreation, I don't see the point of it.

I'm vaguely embarrassed by myself sometimes.

Plays...Maidens aspiring to Godheads and vice versa!

I didn't feel good about cutting out parts of very famous speeches, ... You think you somehow need all of it or you get none of it, but that's not true.

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.

I can put two and two together, you know. Do not think you are dealing with a man who has lost his grapes.

The hard part is getting to the top of page 1.

On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

I consider myself to be a very fortunate person and to have led a very fortunate life.

It seems pointless to be quoted if one isn't going to be quotable ... it's better to be quotable than honest.

If enough things that are untrue are said about you, no one will know what really is true.

Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.

I don't think Stoppardian has a precise definition.

To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.

I like pop music. I consider rock 'n' roll to be a branch of pop music.

I'm offended by things and take pathetic little stands against them.

GUIL: A scientific approach to the examination of phenomena is a defence against the pure emotion of fear

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look? GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer?

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

Any revival in which I am involved is liable to change.

A great production of a black comedy is better than a mediocre production of a comedy of errors.

I was delighted to not go to university. I couldn't wait to be out of education.

I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.

Fatherlessness didn't strike me as being an event. It was a state of life.

Traitors hoist by their own petard?--or victims of the gods?--we shall never know!